Companies that develop computer hardware or software often test products under development by simulating an installation of the product on a variety of operating system and hardware platforms. For example, the manufacturer of a computer system firmware must test a particular hardware platform with each release candidate of the firmware under a multitude of different operating systems (“OS”). In order to perform this type of testing, a technician will typically install a first OS on the computer system from a bootable mass storage device. During and after the installation of the OS, a series of test scripts are executed to stress, qualify, and validate the firmware. For example, scripts may be executed that particularly exercise hardware devices controlled by the firmware, such as a keyboard or mouse input device.
After the test has been completed for the first OS, the technician will then begin the installation of the second OS under test and initiate the particular tests needed during and after installation of that OS. The installation of each OS is a time consuming process with a substantial amount of idle time. There are also periods where the installation process is halted and interaction is required by the technician from the installation process to continue. As a result, this type of testing can be extremely time consuming.
A similar type of testing is also performed by companies that develop computer systems, such as motherboards, and by companies that develop computer peripherals such as media players, keyboards, pointing devices, mass storage media readers, and others. The testing performed by these types of companies often includes connecting peripheral devices to a computer system under test, testing the operation of the devices with the system, removing the devices, connecting other devices for testing, and repeating the process. Testing in this manner is also very labor intensive and time consuming. It is also difficult to make consistent and repeatable since it involves the physical connection and disconnection of devices by a human, a process that is prone to error.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the various embodiments described herein have been made.